Cinnamon is the Wonder Spice for Health and Wellbeing

Cinnamon is well known as the world’s oldest spice. It has a beautiful warm aroma that makes it an inviting ingredient to add to food. In the past Cinnamon was seen as an expensive luxury that was used as an aphrodisiac, and as it was more expensive to buy than silver, many people simply used it as currency. It is a wonder spice for health and wellbeing.

Apart from its amazing taste and aroma that made it so popular for cooking cinnamon was also used by many physicians to treat colds, coughing and sore throats. Burning Cinnamon in your household was thought to cleanse the air and the people within. Roman Emperor Nero took this literally and after he murdered his wife he ordered a year’s supply of cinnamon to be burnt to cleanse him of the crime.
While burning cinnamon may not actually be able to clean out your soul modern day research has found that this most ancient of spices is very good for your health.

Cinnamon And Diabetes

Studies in to the effects of cinnamon on people with diabetes are at this stage very minimal. But the extremely positive results have the medical community screaming for larger trials. In one study conducted in the Malmo University Hospital in Sweden, results showed that eating a meal laced with cinnamon actually lowered the food’s effects on the blood’s sugar levels. The test only included 14 people half of whom were given normal rice pudding while the other half had rice pudding with cinnamon. They repeated the test again at a later date and came up with the same results. The researchers led by Joanna Hlebowicz believe that cinnamon may slow down part of the digestion process giving the body more time to break up the carbohydrates, therefore lessening the post-meal blood-glucose concentration.

Cinnamon And Arthritis

Another test conducted in Copenhagen seems to have found that cinnamon mixed with honey can significantly reduce the pain associated with arthritis. The study was conducted on 200 arthritis suffers who were all given a honey and cinnamon mixture before they ate breakfast. All of the patients tested reported some improvement in their pain management while 73 of those seemed to be relieved of all pain within a month. The results have astounded the medical community and brought hope to the thousands of chronic arthritis sufferers in the world.

While these tests are by no means conclusive, anything that may produce a positive result in the battle against these diseases without any nasty side effects is definitely worth trying.